Building Business to Employee Solutions: 4 Criteria for a Successful Intranet

Let's start with the basics: What is an intranet?  

An intranet is an internal network where different members of an organization share sources and information, with the end goal of improving communication between different areas of that organization. 

Communicating effectively is not always easy to maintain over time, especially when multiple parties are involved in the process.

Imagine a large company. Thousands of people, distributed in different locations, with different roles, priorities, functions, permissions, interests, etc.

How could I communicate internally with all of them according to their role, priority, permission or interest? Just writing it down already seems complicated, and I imagine that reading it must be a bit overwhelming for you too. However, it doesn’t have to be, as long as you have the support of a good intranet.

Before going further into detail, it’s important to consider the "why" in having an intranet. You have to stop and think about what you want to achieve in the first place, and establish how you’ll measure effectiveness.

Some of the factors that will help you measure success are:

1. User participation (login numbers, usage time)
2. User satisfaction
3. Interaction and clicks: Site tagging with analytics to measure user engagement
4. Productivity and time saved

Measuring the effectiveness of your intranet is essential in knowing its success.

While researching this topic, we had the privilege of consulting one of Modyo’s client experts in the domain, José Luis Tapia. He’s the Internal Media Administrator at a top bank in Latin America with 20 years of experience in the industry and was part of the team that updated the organization’s intranet, an employee digital channel that is used by over 14,000 users.  Below are some of the top criteria for a successful intranet.

1. Integrated login with personalized content and information

An intranet must have an integrated log in system that allows you to know each member, their role in the company, history, and interests, so you can determine relevant information. Within an intranet, you are dealing with news, videos, articles, policies, company information and more, and you want to be able to personalize that content for each person in your organization. 

For example, let’s say there’s an event coming up specifically for the commercial area. In this case, we only want the people in this department to attend, as it is relevant to their area and not others’. We would not want the developer team to attend, so it wouldn’t show up as an event when they log in.

Because we are able to target and restrict access to certain information, we are able to create an experience that is fully customized for our different audiences based on their interests, authority and position within the company. 

Your intranet must have the ability to manage content in a segmented and interactive way.

2. Organized Content

A good intranet has content that is informative and organized. It should have search categories so users can access what they need in a faster and more autonomous way.

It’s important to incorporate intelligent forms that form part of a relevant business process, such as any user requesting and managing their days off and leaves of absence. It also gives users a space to share their concerns, requests or comments, a key part in measuring your intranet’s success.

You can have an agenda or calendar of activities, events and birthdays, or a section with information about a product or service offered along with upcoming developments that will be incorporated and will improve the productivity of the organization and communication between different business areas.

3. Scalability and Accessibility

An intranet should be omnichannel, so users can access the resource from a desktop as well as a smartphone on the run, and in a way that is accessible for users with disabilities.

A good intranet should have responsive design so that it can be accessed from any mobile device, so users can receive real-time notifications about any changes or relevant information as well as news related to their role in the company. 

Another fundamental aspect is that the platform that implements your intranet is easily integrated with your business systems and with new business systems that will appear in the future, a concept called future-proofing. The aim is to be able to add new functionalities if they are required.

Leaders such as José Luis Tapia, value this functionality, and as he says:

"Today, any solution that we develop outside of Modyo is easy to integrate because Modyo's architecture allows us to do so.”

We are constantly evolving and what works for us today may not be as important tomorrow.

Business to Employee digital channels such as an intranet  must have the ability to scale over time, allowing it to adapt to the needs of your business. As your company evolves, your intranet should evolve. 

4. Independent Administrators 

For administration to be done effectively, your administrators must have the ability to modify content quickly without having to ask the IT department for help.

Many companies may be dependent on the technical areas for modification of their employee portals, especially in a bank with sensitive information. This slows down the initiatives that may arise from the business areas and consequently ends up affecting the evolution of high value business to employee digital products such as an intranet.

Key aspects that facilitate the work of administrators:

1. Generation of automated responsive templates (easy to create).
2. Organization and administration of profiles with different roles and permissions.
3. Simple creation of forms, surveys, email marketing.
4. Reports, statistics and published version queries module that are intuitive and easy to handle.
5. Version control: to be able to go back to a previous published version in a fast, safe, auditable and simple way.
6. Native metrics of the platform.
7. Local support and advice for continuous improvement in platform management.

If your chosen platform allows you to make changes without needing to know code, updating the intranet will be much more frequent and independent of each administrator and will make it more attractive to the end user.

"We were looking to improve the user experience in the intranet design and Modyo gave us that flexibility."
José Luis Tapia, Banco de Chile

Summary

Business to employee solutions exemplified through intranets help to establish a unified corporate culture where all participating members can share information and interact intelligently with the various tools available.

Intranet administration should be flexible and simple, establishing different roles and access so that each member can work in an independent but controlled way. In other words with efficiency and governance. 

On the other hand, we know that once a digital product such as an intranet is launched, it is necessary to evolve over time. For this reason at Modyo, through our DXP digital experience platform, we focus on large companies that will continue to transform their digital products such as intranets integrated to different business systems. 

And you, are you ready to take your digital channels for hundreds or thousands of employees to the next level? Ask for a Modyo Platform Demo.

Photo by Larisa Birta on Unsplash.